On 2/11/08, Paul Gilbert <pgilbert@bank-banque-canada.ca> wrote:
>
> Stas Kolenikov wrote:
> > ...
> > Training researchers of tomorrow might be great, but ifyour students get
> on
> > the market in the end of the semester, they won't have the luxury of
> waiting
> > until R becomes THE package of choice.
> >
> Not being a teacher, I usually follow these discussions with a bit of
> amusement and some befuddlement. We hire young people hoping they will
> bring in bright new ideas from academia, and academics are training the
> students based on what they think are the old things we use.
> Fortunately, R is already one of the packages of choice many places.
>
> Another point that needs more emphasis is that R is actually a
> programming language, like Matlab and and APL, so it really has more
> general usefulness than "statistics packages" that one might use in the
> narrower context of a statistics course.
>

There are people who would be developing and pricing some novel
financial derivatives -- your "young people" are probably Ph.D. in finance
or statistics or economics, and yes, programming is a must at research
level, and R is a great choice (although economists might say that
GAUSS or Stata is an even greater choice). The original question was about
the first and most likely the only statistics class the health students will
ever take, and the words "graduate level" should not be fooling anybody --
that will have to be a non-calculus data analysis class (Arin Basu can
surprise me here now if it is
different!!!). I would predict the students coming out of it will run
the routine analysis that are spelled out by FDA
and the
likes, and I would think the FDA regulations could go as far as
specific SAS syntax, or at least
to specify SAS PROCs to be used. The GPL software does not necessarily
thrive in commercial and even academic environments -- I have plenty
acquantainces of mine in academia who prefer to use some commercial
flavors of LaTeX over the free miktex
distribution for the illusion of technical support they get for their
money; I expect those people to prefer SPSS or SAS over R for similar
reasons (plus the GUI). I don't argue that R is a greal tool
for innovative work, but rather that it is the best tool for the basic stats
class to a not-so-technical audience, and in the perspective work the
students would be doing.

Of course if you are a full professor you can dismiss any of the comments
and teach the way you like. That's what I'll be planning to do when I get
there :))

-- 
Stas Kolenikov, also found at http://stas.kolenikov.name
Small print: Please do not reply to my Gmail address as I don't check it
regularly.

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